Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of DiscussionsSpencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
Again, the same truth is seen on comparing any one sample of aboriginal
music with a sample of modern music--even an ordinary song for the piano;
which we find to be relatively highly heterogeneous, not only in respect of
the varieties in the pitch and in the length of the notes, the number of
different notes sounding at the same instant in company with the voice, and
the variations of strength with which they are sounded and sung, but in
respect of the changes of key, the changes of time, the changes of _timbre_
of the voice, and the many other modifications of expression. While between
the old monotonous dance-chant and a grand opera of our own day, with its
endless orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, the contrast in
heterogeneity is so extreme that it seems scarcely credible that the one
should have been the ancestor of the other.
Were they needed, many further illustrations might be cited. Going back to
the early time when the deeds of the god-king, chanted and mimetically
represented in dances round his altar, were further narrated in
picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so constituted a
rude literature, we might trace the development of Literature through
phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, it presents in one work
theology, cosmogony, history, biography, civil law, ethics, poetry; through
other phases in which, as in the Iliad, the religious, martial, historical,
the epic, dramatic, and lyric elements are similarly commingled; down to
its present heterogeneous development, in which its divisions and
subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to defy complete classification.
Or we might trace out the evolution of Science; beginning with the era in
which it was not yet differentiated from Art, and was, in union with Art,
the handmaid of Religion; passing through the era in which the sciences
were so few and rudimentary, as to be simultaneously cultivated by the same
philosophers; and ending with the era in which the genera and species are
so numerous that few can enumerate them, and no one can adequately grasp
even one genus. Or we might do the like with Architecture, with the Drama,
with Dress.
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